Archival Experiments, Notes and (Dis)orientations

In this article, the authors take up the historical figure of Dr Betty Paërl, who has surprisingly turned up in very different kinds of specialised archives. The white mathematics professor was located in IHLIA LGBT+ Heritage, the largest queer heritage collection in Europe, as a notable SM sexpert and spokesperson on transgender politics, and also found during archival research into the anti-(neo)colonial struggles of Suriname against the Dutch. Upon closer inspection of the materials, the authors find the recurrent image/item of the whip that presses them to carefully think through how the archive of Dr Paërl casts light on a history that Katherine McKittrick calls being ‘in the shadow of the whip’. The article aims to combine an analysis of these versions of the whip in different visual and discursive registers to detect the liberatory politics underlying her activisms. To do so, the authors develop the intersectional model of the kaleidoscope employed by Dutch Black, migrant and refugee (BMR) feminist theorists to grasp the shifting patterns of power that Paërl battled and embodied as an activist of the anticolonial struggle, for sex workers’ rights, for kinky sex and for transgender people. This is all the more important in the historical study of transgender visual materials that most often arrive in archives via medical and police photography or pornographic materials. The historical researcher, the article argues, should be wary of (re)producing a static vision that would reduce transgender figures to sex and gender politics, or eclipse a vision of trans politics that dilates beyond sexuality.

Section: The Whip: Producing a Temporal Drag With A Resounding Cracksupporting

confidence: 72%

How to Read Dr Betty Paërl’s Whip: Intersectional Visions of Trans/Gender, Sex Worker and Decolonial Activism in the Archive

Isenia¹,

Steinbock²

2022

“…Archiving practices have been at the core of feminist activism since the early twentieth century (Vriend, 2011), from creating collections focused on women’s lives and feminist history, to developing more inclusive vocabulary and standards like the women’s thesaurus in the 1970s (Drabinski, 2013). The last few decades have seen increased interest in the idea of the archive and its role in feminist, queer and diasporic contexts (Swaby and Frank, 2020). Feminist, queer and decolonial perspectives on digital archiving practices also point out multiple strategies to make memory institution more inclusive, from creating a more diverse cultural heritage to changing the structures of archival practice (Dever, 2017; Risam, 2019).…”

Section: Reimagining Archival Structures and Interpretationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

visual methods for desire and wonder in the digital heritage

Hansson

2023

The digitalisation of cultural heritage creates expectations for improved research methods and more diverse and inclusive memory institutions. However, it is difficult to take advantage of the opportunities the quantification might give owing to deficient and inadequate metadata. The diversity of standards and wilfulness in different historical archive practices creates problems when aggregating data from various sources. The ambition to create more diverse and inclusive memory institutions, compensating for the historical lack of justice, also creates the risk of excluding important contexts from the digital collections. To develop research methods that take this archival wilfulness into account, in this study I have used speculative design to explore images from Europeana, the digital archive that aggregates data from memory institutions all over Europe. Instead of seeing this archive as something lacking in terms of shared standards and inclusive vocabularies, I suggest we see Europeana as a queer collection of wilful archival practices, by showing the desires and imaginations represented in the archival context. By contrasting the visual content of an image with the metadata that describes the image, the norms and desires in the archival practice come into focus, as the metadata points out what at the time was considered interesting about an image, and the reason the photograph was taken. Images described as ‘Swedes’, for example, rarely show pictures of Swedes in Sweden. Swedes are described as Swedes when they are outside Sweden. It is the exotic and foreign that are categorised. Most importantly, the person who controls the camera is not in the picture, but the choice of perspective and the metadata description of the image tell us something about the photographer’s and archivist’s will and desires. By visually reversing the perspective and making visible both norms and deviations, I show how one can approach this digital heritage with a methodology of feminist wonder.

“…We're now probably seeing more issues that reflect different forms of practice. For example, in the 'Archives' issue I co-edited with Chandra Frank and Yasmin Gunaratnam in 2020 (Swaby, Frank and Gunaratnam, 2020), we commissioned a poem and an illustration, photographs by a seed librarian, and we include a roundtable discussion between an archivist, a scholar and an artist. The issue was curated to make these different types of interventions as a queer feminist diaspora archive, not just a traditional academic intervention.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Black feminist texts, presences, methods: a dialogue

Lascelles,

Swaby

2023

Feminist Review (FR) editors Nydia A. Swaby and Amber Lascelles met at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, Brixton, London in February 2023 to record a conversation exploring Black feminism as an 'object' (Lewis, 2020) in our writing and research. This dialogue reflects on the journal's Black feminist genealogies, our reasons for joining the editorial board, FR's move to 198 Contemporary, how we navigate Black feminist epistemologies and how community and care influence the journal and shape our writing. We sat in the new office, surrounded by FR journal back issues and inspiring Black feminist texts. Quotations from these Black feminist texts, and others we think with, are interspersed throughout the piece to act as a 'presence' (Lewis, 2017). declarations of presenceHere then is a declaration of presence, not just an unwanted independence, through the double and inseparable vectors 'black' and 'female' proclaimed as a desire for recognition and space in a multitude of struggles that have a history of erasing, marginalising and even denouncing some aspect of who she is and might become.